Weekly Business Review (WBR): The Amazon-Style Template, Agenda and Action Log

TL;DR

• A weekly business review (WBR) is a fixed weekly meeting where the leadership team walks the same set of metrics, in the same format, and every metric owner explains any number that moved outside its normal range.
• The model most teams copy is Amazon's: a static metric deck, controllable input metrics ahead of output metrics, a one-hour limit, and an owner who says "I don't know" rather than guess.
• The template below gives you the agenda, the deck structure, the explain-the-variance rule and an action log with owner and due date. It runs in 60 minutes.
• Sentra automates the WBR prep. It brings each owner the numbers that moved, the reasons from the emails, meetings and chats behind them, and the commitments still open from last week.

What is a weekly business review (WBR)?

A weekly business review, or WBR, is a recurring leadership meeting that reviews the company's key input and output metrics against plan every week, so problems are caught and assigned while they are still small. In a WBR the deck stays the same from week to week, each metric has one owner, and the owner arrives already knowing why their number moved.

The term WBR has other meanings. Business Review Weekly, for example, was an Australian business magazine (wikipedia.org)). In operating terms, WBR almost always refers to the Amazon-style meeting described in Working Backwards by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr. They write that the WBR was born from a postmortem held after a difficult holiday season, and that its first version was built on the Six Sigma DMAIC method, "Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control" (goodreads.com).

A WBR is not a strategy meeting and not a status meeting. Strategy debates are moved offline. Status updates go in writing. The WBR exists to answer one question each week: which numbers are behaving abnormally, why, and who is handling it.

How Amazon runs the WBR

The most detailed public account comes from Commoncog, based on work with Colin Bryar (commoncog.com). The mechanics are specific, and the specifics are what make it work.

• Cadence. Data for the prior week is ready after midnight Sunday. Metric owners review their numbers on Monday, departments hold their own WBRs on Tuesday, and the company-level WBR runs on Wednesday morning.
• Length. The meeting must finish in 60 minutes, or 90 minutes in the holiday season.
• Scale. Amazon's executive WBR covers roughly 400 to 500 metrics. The Commoncog author's own business runs its WBR on 47. You do not need hundreds.
• Facilitator. Someone from Finance usually opens the meeting by following up on last week's actions. Finance can also audit any metric independently.
• Owners present. Each metric owner presents their own graph. A routine graph gets "nothing to see here" and about a second of attention. No metric is skipped, so everyone learns what normal looks like.
• Static deck. No live dashboards, no tab switching. The deck is organized with the exact same metrics as the previous week, in the exact same format (holistics.io).
• No invented explanations. If an owner cannot find the cause of an exceptional move, they say "I don't know" and the facilitator logs a follow-up.

Controllable input metrics and output metrics

Working Backwards argues that "the CEO, and companies in general, have very little ability to directly control output metrics" (goodreads.com). Output metrics include weekly revenue, total customers and stock price. Controllable input metrics are the activities a team directly controls that drive those outputs.

Amazon's own example shows how input metrics get refined. The team first measured selection as the number of new detail pages created. The WBR revealed that was the wrong input, and the metric became the percentage of detail page views where the product was in stock and ready for two-day shipping (holistics.io).

Weekly business review template

Use this template as a weekly business review template for a leadership team of 6 to 12 people. It assumes 20 to 60 metrics. Add more only when an input stops predicting its output.

Weekly business review agenda (60 minutes)

Two rules keep the time. Any discussion longer than two minutes on one metric moves to a follow-up. Any metric inside its normal range gets "nothing to see here" and the next owner starts.

Metric deck structure

Build the deck once and do not change its order without a reason.

1. Cover page. Week number, date range, the three metrics that crossed a threshold, and the count of open actions.

2. Scoreboard. Revenue, gross margin, cash and customer count against plan and prior year.

3. One section per area. Sales, customers, operations, people and finance. Inputs first, then the outputs they drive.

4. One chart per metric. Amazon's standard is the 6-12 graph: trailing six weeks on the left, trailing twelve months on the right, last year as a faded line, and the target marked (commoncog.com). Print the values on the chart.

5. Box score under each chart. This week, week over week, versus plan, versus prior year.

6. Owner and note. The owner's name, and a one-line note if the metric moved abnormally.

7. Voice of the customer. A short page with real customer quotes or a ticket.

8. Action log. The full list, sorted by due date.

For which metrics belong on the scoreboard, see our KPI dashboard template.

The explain-the-variance rule

Every metric that crosses its threshold, or moves outside its normal week-to-week range, must arrive with a written explanation. The owner fills in four fields before the meeting.

• What moved. "Pipeline created fell 31% week over week."
• Why, with evidence. "Two field events were cancelled. The events lead confirmed it in the 14 October marketing sync."
• Next step. "Shift budget to the November webinar series."
• Owner and date. "VP Marketing, by 4 November."

If the cause is not known, the note says "Cause not yet confirmed" and names who will confirm it and by when. A guessed cause is worse than an honest gap, because it ends the inquiry. Our variance analysis guide covers how to break a financial gap into its drivers, and the root cause analysis template covers how to write up a cause once it is confirmed.

Action log

Each action has one owner, one due date and a status the facilitator reads out at the start of the next WBR. Late items stay on the log until they are done or explicitly dropped. The log is where most WBRs quietly fail: actions get raised in the room, recorded in someone's notes, and never come back.

How to run a WBR in 60 minutes

1. Freeze the data on Monday. Pull last week's numbers from the warehouse, CRM, ERP and HRIS on Monday morning. Nobody edits the numbers in the meeting.

2. Owners review on Monday and Tuesday. Each owner checks their charts, writes notes for anything abnormal, and chases causes before Wednesday.

3. Send the deck 12 hours ahead. People read it before the meeting, so the meeting is for questions.

4. Start with actions, not metrics. Reading out last week's actions first tells the room that commitments are tracked.

5. Walk every metric, quickly. Normal metrics take seconds. Abnormal ones take a minute or two, and only if the owner has a note.

6. Close by reading back new actions. Owner, action and due date, said aloud and written in the log before anyone leaves.

7. Publish notes within a day. The facilitator sends the updated action log and any "I don't know" follow-ups.

Most teams need six to eight weeks before the WBR feels routine. The first weeks surface broken definitions and missing owners. That is the point.

How leadership teams automate WBR prep

The meeting takes an hour. The prep usually takes far longer, spread across analysts, a chief of staff and every metric owner. It breaks down into four jobs.

• Refreshing the numbers. Connect the deck to your warehouse or BI layer so charts update on a schedule. This is solved. Any BI tool or a connected spreadsheet can do it.
• Spotting what moved. Threshold rules or simple control limits flag metrics outside their normal range. This is also mostly solved.
• Finding why it moved. This is the slow part. The reason for a missed number is rarely in the data. It is in a sales call, a supplier email, a Slack thread about a delayed release, or a meeting where a discount was approved. Owners spend Monday and Tuesday reading threads and asking colleagues.
• Tracking what was promised. Actions raised last week, and commitments made in other meetings during the week, need to be checked against what actually happened. Most teams do this by hand from meeting notes.

The first two jobs belong to your BI tool. The last two are a context problem.

Where Sentra fits

Sentra handles the WBR prep that BI tools cannot. It connects email, chat, meetings and documents alongside ERP, CRM, HRIS and BI, across 200+ integrations, and reasons over them to work out what is true now, why, and who is working on it.

Before each WBR, Sentra gives every metric owner three things. The numbers in their area that moved outside their normal range. The likely reasons, drawn from the threads, calls and documents behind each number, with every claim cited to its source. And the commitments still open from last week's action log and from other meetings, with what has happened on each since. Owners walk in with the cause, or with an honest "not yet confirmed" and a named follow-up.

Sentra knows when a fact became true and when it stopped being true, so last month's explanation is not recycled for this month's miss. A named person approves anything Sentra raises before it reaches anyone else. Answers respect the permissions of each source, so an owner sees only what they could already open. Teams can ask follow-up questions in Slack, in the Sentra app, or inside ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or Gemini over REST and MCP. Sentra does not replace your BI tool or your deck. It supplies the reasons and the follow-through around them.

At Lenskart, time to root cause fell from 3 to 4 days to about 30 minutes. That is the gap between a WBR where owners guess and one where they know.

Sentra holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications and deploys in the cloud, in an isolated VPC or air-gapped on premises.

To see automated WBR prep on your own metrics, book a demo at /demo.

How to start a WBR

• Week 1. Pick 20 to 30 metrics. Write a definition and name one owner for each. Build the deck in a spreadsheet or slides with the 6-12 layout.
• Weeks 2 to 4. Run the meeting at a fixed time. Enforce the 60-minute limit and the explain-the-variance rule. Expect definitions to change.
• Weeks 5 to 8. Add the action log discipline. Read out every open action at the start. Drop metrics nobody discusses and add inputs that explain outputs better.
• After week 8. Measure prep time. If owners still spend most of Monday and Tuesday chasing reasons, automate that step. For a quarterly version with customers, see our QBR template, and for a one-page summary to send after the meeting, see the executive briefing template.

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